The horrors of Aleppo,seen by a German eyewitness; a word to Germany's accredited representatives,by Dr. Martin Niepage ...

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THE HORRORS
OF ALEPPO . .

Seen by a
GERMAN EYEWITNESS

A Word to Germany's Accredited
Representatives by Dr. Martin
Niepage, Higher Grade Teacher
in the German Technical School at
Aleppo, at present at Wernigerode

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LONDON : ADELPHI TERRACE

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THE HORRORS OF
ALEPPO

Seen by a German Eyewitness.

(A word to Germany's Accredited Representatives

by Dr. Martin Niepage, Higher Grade Teacher

in the German Technical School at Aleppo,

at present at Wernigerode.)

When I returned to Aleppo in September,
1915, from a three months' hohday at Beirout,
I heard with horror that a new phase of Armenian
massacres had begun which were far more
terrible than the earlier massacres under Abd-ul-
Hamid, and which aimed at exterminating,
root and branch, the intelligent, industrious, and
progressive Armenian nation, and at transferring
its property to Turkish hands.

Such monstrous news left me at first in-
credulous. I was told that, in various quarters
of Aleppo, there were lying masses of half-
starved people, the survivors of so-called " de-
portation convoys." In order, I was told, to
cover the extermination of the Armenian nation
with a political cloak, mihtary reasons were being
put forward, which were said to make it neces-
sary to drive the Armenians out of their native
seats, which had been theirs for 2,500 years, and

to deport them to the Arabian deserts. I was
also told that individual Armenians had lent
themselves to acts of espionage.

After I had informed myself about the facts
and had made enquiries on all sides, I came to
the conclusion that all these accusations against
the Armenians were, in fact, based on trifling
provocations, which were taken as an excuse
for slaughtering 10,000 innocents for one guilty-
person, for the most savage outrages against
women and children, and for a campaign of
starvation against the exiles which was intended
to exterminate the whole nation.

To test the conclusion derived from my infor-
mation, I visited all the places in the city where
there were Armenians left behind by the con-
voys. In dilapidated caravansaries (hans) I
found quantities of dead, many corpses being half-
decomposed, and others, still living, among them,
who were soon to breathe their last. In other
yards I found quantities of sick and starving
people whom no one was looking after. In the
neighbourhood of the German Technical School,
at which I am employed as a higher grade teacher,
there were four such hans, with seven or eight
hundred exiles d5dng of starvation. We teachers
and our pupils had to pass by them every day.
Every time we went out we saw through the
open windows their pitiful forms, emaciated and
wrapped in rags. In the mornings our school
children, on their way through the narrow
streets, had to push past the two-wheeled ox-

carts, on which every day from eight to ten
rigid corpses, without coffin or shroud, were
carried away, their arms and legs traiHng out
of the vehicle.

After I had shared this spectacle for several
days I thought it my duty to compose the
following report : —

" As teachers in the German Technical
School at Aleppo, we permit ourselves
with all respect to make the following
report : —

" We feel it our duty to draw attention
to the fact that our educational work will
forfeit its moral basis and the esteem of the
natives, if the German Government is not
in a position to put a stop to the brutality
with which the wives and children of
slaughtered Armenians are being treated
here.

" Out of convoys which, when they
left their homes on the Armenian plateau,
numbered from two to three thousand
men, women and children, onl}^ two or
three hundred survivors arrive here in the
south. The men are slaughtered on the
way; the women and girls, with the ex-
ception of the old, the ugly and those who
are still children, have been abused by
Turkish soldiers and officers and then
carried away to Turkish and Kurdish
villages, where they have to accept Islam.
They try to destroy the remnant of the

B

convoys by hunger and thirst. Even when
they are fording rivers, they do not allow
those dying of thirst to drink. All the
nourishment they receive is a daily ration
of a little meal sprinkled over their hands,
which they lick off greedily, and its only
effect is to protract their starvation.

" Opposite the German Technical School
at Aleppo, in which we are engaged in
teaching, a mass of about four hundred
emaciated forms, the remnant of such
convoys, is lying in one of the hans.
There are about a hundred children (boys
and girls) among them, from five to seven
years old. Most of them are suffering
from typhoid and dysentery. When one
enters the yard, one has the impression of
entering a mad-house. If one brings them
food, one notices that they have forgotten
how to eat. Their stomach, weakened by
months of starvation, can no longer as-
similate nourishment. If one gives them
bread, they put it aside indifferently. They
just lie there quietly, waiting for death.

" Amid such surroundings, how are we
teachers to read German Fairy Stories with
our children, or, indeed, the story of the
Good Samaritan in the Bible ? How are
we to make them decline and conjugate
irrelevant words, while round them in the
yards adjoining the German Technical
School their starving fellow-countrymen

are slowly succumbing? Under such cir-
cumstances our educational work flies in
the face of all true morality and becomes
a mockery of human sympathy.

" And what becomes of these poor
people who have been driven in thousands
through Aleppo and the neighbourhood
into the deserts, reduced almost entirely,
by this time, to women and children?
They are driven on and on from one place
to another. The thousands shrink to hun-
dreds and the hundreds to tiny remnants,
and even these remnants are driven on
till the last is dead. Then at last they have
reached the goal of their wandering, the
' New Homes assigned to the Armenians,'
as the newspapers phrase it.

" ' Ta'ahm el aleman ' (' the teaching
of the Germans ') is the simple Turk's
explanation to everyone who asks him
about the originators of these measures.

" The educated Moslems are convinced
that, even though the German nation dis-
countenances such horrors, the German
Government is taking no steps to put a
stop to them, out of consideration for its
Turkish Ally.

" Mohammedans, too, of more sensitive
feelings — Turks and Arabs alike — shake
their heads in disapproval and do not
conceal their tears when they see a convoy
of exiles marching through the city, and

B 2

8

Turkish soldiers using cudgels upon women
in advanced pregnancy and upon dying
people who can no longer drag themselves
along. They cannot believe that their
Government has ordered these atrocities,
and they hold the Germans responsible
for all such outrages, Germany being con-
sidered during the war as Turkey's school-
master in everything. Even the mollahs
in the mosques say that it was not the
Sublime Porte but the German officers
who ordered the ill-treatment and de-
struction of the Armenians.

" The things which have been passing
here for months under everybody's eyes
will certainly remain as a stain on Ger-
many's shield in the memory of Orientals.

" In order not to be obliged to give up
their faith in the character of the Germans,
which they have hitherto respected, many
educated Mohammedans explain the situa-
tion to themselves as follows : ' The Ger-
man nation,' they say, ' probably knows
nothing about the frightful massacres which
are on foot at the present time against the
native Christians in all parts of Turkey.
Knowing the German love of truth, how
otherwise can we explain the articles we
read in German newspapers, which appear
to know of nothing except that individual
Armenians have been deservedly shot by
martial law as spies and traitors ? ' Others

again say : ' Perhaps the German Govern-
ment has had its hands tied by some
treaty defining its powers, or perhaps inter-
vention is inopportune for the moment.'

" I know for a fact that the Embassy
at Constantinople has been informed by
the German Consulates of all that has been
happening. As, however, there has not
been so far the least change in the system
of deportation, I feel myself compelled
by conscience to make my present report."
At the time when I composed this report,
the German Consul at Aleppo was represented
by his colleague from Alexandretta — Consul
Hoffmann, Consul Hoffmann informed me that
the German Embassy had been advised in detail
about the events in the interior in repeated
reports from the Consulates at Alexandretta,
Aleppo and Mosul. He told me that a report
of what I had seen with my own eyes would,
however, be welcome as a supplement to these
official documents and as a description in detail.
He said he would convey my report to the Em-
bassy at Constantinople by a sure agency. I
now worked out a report on the desired lines,
giving an exact description of the state of things
in the han opposite our school.

Consul Hoffmann wished to add some photo-
graphs which he had taken in the han himself.
The photographs displayed piles of corpses,
among which children still alive were crawling
about.

10

In its revised form the report was signed by
my colleague, Dr. Graeter (higher grade teacher),
and by Frau Marie Spiecker, as well as by myself.
The head of our institution, Director Huber,
also placed his name to it and added a few
words in the following sense : " My colleague
Dr. Niepage's report is not at &l] exaggerated.
For weeks we have been living here in an atmo-
sphere poisoned with sickness and the stench of
corpses. Only the hope of speedy relief makes
it possible for us to carry on our wcrk."

The rehef did not come. I then thought of
resigning my post as higher grade teacher in
the Technical School, on the ground that it was
senseless and morally unjustifiable to be a repre-
sentative of European civihsation with the task
of bringing moral and intellectual education
to a nation if, at the same time, one had to look
on passively while the Government of the
country was abandoning one's pupils' fellow-
countrymen to an agonising death by starvation.

Those around me, however, as well as the
head of our institution. Director Huber, dis-
suaded me from my intention. It was pointed
out to me that there was value in our continued
presence in the- country, as eye-witnesses of
what went on. Perhaps, it was suggested, our
presence might have some effect in making the
Turks behave more humanely towards their
unfortunate victims, out of consideration for us
Germans. I see now that I have remained far
too long a silent witness of all this wickedness.

II

Our presence had no ameliorating effect
whatever, and what we could do personally
came to little. Frau Spiecker, our brave, ener-
getic colleague, bought soap, and all the women
and children in our neighbourhood who were
still alive — there were no men left — were washed
and cleansed from lice. Frau Spiecker set women
to work to make soup for those who could still
assimilate nourishment. I, myself, distributed
two pails of tea and cheese and moistened bread
among the dying children every evening for
six weeks ; but when the Hunger-Typhus or
Spotted-Typhus spread through the city from
these charnel houses, six of us succumbed to it
and had to give up our relief work. Indeed, for
the exiles who came to Aleppo, help was really
useless. We could only afford those doomed to
death a few slight alleviations of their death agony.

What we saw with our own eyes here in
Aleppo was really only the last scene in the
great tragedy of the extermination of the
Armenians. It was only a minute fraction of
the horrible drama that was being played out
simultaneously in all the other provinces of
Turkey. Many more appalling things were re-
ported by the engineers of the Bagdad Railway,
when they came back from their work on the
section under construction, or by German
travellers who met the convoys of exiles on their
journeys. Many of these gentlemen had seen
such appalling sights that they could eat nothing
for days.

12

One of them, Herr Greif, of Aleppo, reported
corpses of violated women lying about naked
in heaps on the railway embankment at Tell-
Abiad and Ras-el-Ain. Another, Herr Spiecker,
of Aleppo, had seen Turks tie Armenian men
together, fire several volleys of small shot with
fowling-pieces into the human mass, and go
off laughing while their victims slowly perished
in frightful convulsions. Other men had their
hands tied behind their back and were rolled
down steep cliffs. Women were standing below,
who slashed those who had rolled down v/ith
knives until they were dead. A Protestant
pastor who, two years before, had given a
very warm welcome to my colleague. Doctor
Graeter, when he was passing through his
village, had his finger nails torn out.

The German Consul from Mosul related, in
my presence, at the German club at Aleppo
that; in many places on the road from Mosul
to Aleppo, he had seen children's hands l3ang
hacked off in such numbers that one could have
paved the road with them. In the German
hospital at Ourfa there was a little girl who had
had both her hands hacked off.

In an Arab village on the way to Aleppo
Herr Hoist ein, the German Consul from Mosul,
saw shallow graves with freshly-buried Armenian
corpses. The Arabs of the village declared that
they had killed these Armenians by the Govern-
ment's orders. One asserted proudly that he
personally had killed eight.

13

In many Christian houses in Aleppo I found
Armenian girls hidden who by some chance
had escaped death; either they had been left
Ipng exhausted and had been taken for dead
when their companions had been driven on,
or, in other cases, Europeans had found an oppor-
tunity to buy the poor creatures for a few marks
from the last Turkish soldier who had violated
them. All these girls showed symptoms of mental
derangement ; many of them had had to watch
the Turks cut their parents' throats. I know
pooT things who have not had a single word
coaxed out of them for months, and not a smile
to this moment. A girl about fourteen years
old was given shelter by Herr Krause, Depot
Manager for the Bagdad Railway at Aleppo.
The girl had been so many times ravished by
Turkish soldiers in one night that she had com-
pletely lost her reason. I saw her tossing on her
pillow in delirium with burning lips, and could
hardly get water down her throat.

A German I know saw hundreds of Christian
peasant women who were compelled, near Ourfa,
to strip naked by the Turkish soldiers. For the
amusement of the soldiers they had to drag
themselves through the desert in this condition
for days together in a temperature of 40°
Centigrade, until their skins were completely
scorched. Another witness saw a Turk tear a
child out of its Armenian mother's womb and
hurl it against the wall.

There are other occurrences, worse than these

^4

few examples which I give here, recorded in the
numerous reports which have been sent in to the
Embassy from the German Consulates at Alexan-
dretta, Aleppo and Mosul. The Consuls are of
opinion that, so far, probably about one milHon
Armenians have perished in the massacres of
the last few months. Of this number, one must
reckon that at least half are women and children
who have either been murdered or have suc-
cumbed to starvation.

It is a duty of conscience to bring these
things into publicity, and, although the Turkish
Government, in destrojdng the Armenian nation,
may only be pursuing objects of internal policy,
the way this policy is being carried out has many
of the characteristics of a general persecution of
Christians.

- All the tens of thousands of girls and women
who have been carried off into Turkish harems,
and the masses of children who have been col-
lected by the Government and distributed among
the Turks and Kurds, are lost to Christendom,
and have to accept Islam. The abusive epithet
" giaour " is now heard once again by German
ears.

At Adana I saw a crowd of Armenian orphans
marching through the streets under a guard of
Turkish soldiers; their parents have been
slaughtered and the children have to become
Mohammedans. Everywhere there have been
cases in which adult Armenians were able to
save their lives by readiness to accept Islam.

15

Sometimes, however, the Turkish officials first
made the Christians present a petition to be
received into the communion of Islam, and then
answered very grandly, in order to throw dust
in the eyes of Europeans, that religion is not a
thing to play with. These officials preferred to
have the petitioners killed. Men like Talaat
Bey and Enver Pasha, when prominent Armenians
brought them presents, often tempered their
thanks with the remark that they would have
been still better pleased if the Armenian givers
had made their presents as Mohammedans. A
newspaper reporter was told by one of these
gentlemen : " Certainly we are now punishing
many innocent people as well. But we have
to guard ourselves even against those who may
one day become guilty." On such grounds
Turkish statesmen justify the wholesale slaughter
of defenceless women and children. A German
Catholic ecclesiastic reported that Enver Pasha
declared, in the presence of Monsignore Dolci,
the Papal Envoy at Constantinople, that he
would not rest so long as a single Armenian
remained alive.

The object of the deportations is the ex-
termination of the whole Armenian nation.
This purpose is also proved by the fact that the
Turkish Government declines all assistance from
Missionaries, Sisters of Mercy and European
residents in the country, and systematically
tries to stop their work. A Swiss engineer was
to have been brought before a court-martial

i6

because he had distributed bread in Anatolia to
the starving Armenian women and children in a
convoy of exiles. The Government has not
hesitated even to deport Armenian pupils and
teachers from the German schools at Adana and
Aleppo, and Armenian children from the German
orphanages, without regard to all the efforts of
the Consuls and the heads of the institutions
involved. The Government also rejected the
American Government's offer to take the exiles
to America on American ships and at America's
expense.

The opinion of our German Consuls and of
many foreigners resident in the country about
the Armenian massacres will some day become
known through their reports. I can say nothing
about the verdict of the German officers in
Turkey. I often noticed, when in their com-
pany, an ominous silence or a convulsive effort
to change the subject when any German of
warm sympathies and independent judgment
began to speak about the Armenians' frightful
sufferings.

When Field-Marshal von der Goltz was
travelling to Bagdad and had to cross the
Euphrates at Djerablus, there was a large
encampment of half-starved Armenian exiles
there. Just before the Field-Marshal's arrival,
so I was told at Djerablus, these unhappy
people, the sick and dying with the rest, were
driven under the whip several kilometres away
over the nearest hills. When von der Goltz

17

passed through, there were no traces left of the
repulsive spectacle ; but when I visited the place
shortly afterwards with some of my colleagues,
we found corpses of men, women and children
still lying in out-of-the-way places, ard frag-
ments of clothes, skulls and bones which had
been partly stripped of the flesh by jackals
and birds of prey.

The author of the present report considers
it out of the question that, if the German
Government is seriously determined to stem
the tide of destruction even at this eleventh
hour, it would find it impossible to bring the
Turkish Government to reason. If the Turks
are really so well inclined to us Germans as
people say, cannot they have it pointed out to
them how seriously they compromise us before
the whole civilised world, if we, as their Allies,
have to look on passively while our fellow-
Christians in Turkey are slaughtered in their
hundreds of thousands, their women and
daughters violated, their children brought up
as Mohammedans? Cannot the Turks be made
to understand that their barbarities are reckoned
to our account, and that we Germans will be
accused either of criminal compHcity or of
contemptible weakness, if we shut our eyes
to the frightful horrors which this war has
produced, and seek to pass over in silence facts
which are already notorious all over the world?
If the Turks are really as intelligent as is said,
should it be impossible to convince them that,

i8

in exterminating the Christian nations in Turkey,
they are destroying the productive factors and
the intermediaries of European trade and general
civilisation ? If the Turks are as far-sighted
as is said, can they blind themselves to the
danger that, when the civilised States of Europe
have taken cognisance of what has been happening
in Turkey during the war, they may be driven
to the conclusion that Turkey has forfeited the
right to govern herself and has destroyed once
for all any belief in her tolerance and capacity
for civilisation ? Will not the German Govern-
ment be standing for what is best in Turkey's
own interest, if it hinders Turkey from ruining
herself morally and economically?

In this report I hope to reach the Govern-
ment's ear through the accredited representatives
of the German nation.

When the Reichstag sits in Committee,
these things must no longer be passed over,
however painful they are. Nothing could put
us more to shame than the erection at Con-
stantinople of a Turco-German palace of friend-
ship at huge expense, while we are not in a
position to shield our fellow-Christians from
barbarities unparalleled even in the blood-
stained history of Turkey. Would not the funds
collected be better spent in building orphanages
for the inn®cent victims of Turkey's barbarities ?

After the massacres of igog a kind of recon-
cihation banquet was held at Adana, in which
the heads of the Armenian clergy took part

19

as well as high Turkish officials. The German
Consul, Bilge, who was present, related that an
Armenian ecclesiastic got up and said in his
speech : " It is true that we Armenians have
lost much in these days of massacre — our men,
our women, our children and our goods. But
you Turks have lost more; you have lost your
honour."

If we persist in treating the massacres of
Christians as Turkey's internal affair, which is
not important for us except as making us sure
of the Turks' friendship, then we must change
the whole orientation of our German culture
policy. We must stop sending German teachers
to Turkey, and we teachers must give up telling
our pupils in Turkey about German poets and
philosophers, German culture and German ideals
— to say nothing of German Christianity.

Three years ago I was sent by the Foreign
Office as higher grade teacher to the German
Technical School at Aleppo. The Prussian
Provincial School Board at Magdeburg specially
enjoined upon me, when I went out, to show
myself worthy of the confidence reposed in me
in the grant of furlough to take up this educa-
tional post at Aleppo. I should not be fulfilling
my duty as a German official and an accredited
representative of German culture, if I consented
to keep silence in face of the atrocities of which
I was a witness, or to look on passively while
the pupils entrusted to me were driven out to
die of starvation in the desert.

20

If anyone enquires into the motives which
induced the Young Turkish Government to
decree and carry out these frightful measures
against the Armenians, one might give the
following explanation : —

The Young Turk has the European ideal of
a united national state always floating before
his eyes. He hopes to turkify the non-Turkish
Mohammedan races — Kurds, Persians, Arabs,
and so on — by administrative methods and
through Turkish education, reinforced by an
appeal to their common interests as Moham-
medans. The Christian nations — Armenians,
Syrians and Greeks — alarm him by their cultural
and economic superiority, and he sees in their
religion an obstacle to turkifying them by
peaceful means. They have, therefore, to be
exterminated or converted to Mohammedanism
by force. The Turks do not suspect that, in
doing this, they are sawing off the branch on
which they are sitting themselves. Who is to
bring progress to Turkey if not the Greeks,
Armenians and Syrians, who constitute more
than a quarter of the population of the
Empire ?

The Turks, the least gifted of all the races
living in Turkey, are themselves only a minority
of the population, and are still far behind even
the Arabs in civilisation. Where is there any
Turkish trade, Turkish handicraft, Turkish manu-
facture, Turkish art, Turkish science ? Even
their law, religion and language, so far as it

21

can be given literary form, have been borrowed
Irom the conquered Arabs.

We teachers who have been teaching Greeks,
Armenians, Arabs, Turks and Jews in German
schools in Turkey for years, can only declare
that the pure Turks are the most unwilling and
incapable of all our pupils. When, for once in
a way, a Turk achieves something, in nine cases
out of ten one can be certain that one is dealing
with a Circassian, an Albanian, or a Turk with
Bulgarian blood in his veins. From my personal
experience I can only prophesy that the Turks
proper will never achieve anything in trade,
manufacture or science.

We are told now in German newspapers of
the Turks' hunger for education and of how
they are thronging eagerly to learn German.
There are even reports of language courses for
adults which have been started in Turkey.
They are certainly started, but with what results ?
They go on to tell one of a language course at
a Technical School which opened with twelve
Turkish teachers as pupils. The author of this
story forgets, however, to add that, after four
lessons, only six pupils put in an appearance;
after five lessons, five; after six lessons, four,
and, after seven lessons, only three, so that
after eight lessons the course came to an end,
through the laziness of the pupils, before it had
properly begun. If the pupils had been Ar-
menians they would have persevered until the
end of the school year, learnt patiently, and

22

come away with a respectable mastery of the
German language.

What is Germany's duty and, indeed, the
duty of every civilised Christian nation in face
of the Armenian massacres? We must try
every means of saving the half million of Ar-
menian women and children who may still be
alive in Turkey to-day, and who are abandoned
to death by starvation, from an end which
would be a disgrace to the whole civilised world.
The hundreds of thousands of deported women
and children who have been left lying on the
borders of the Mesopotamian desert, and on the
roads leading thither, can only maintain their
miserable existence a short time longer. How
long can people really support life by picking
grains of corn out of horse-dung and depending
for the rest upon grass ? Months of insufficient
nourishment and the prevailing dysentery will
have brought countless numbers into a state
past help. But at Konia a few thousand
Armenians are still alive — educated people from
Constantinople, who were in easy circumstances
before their deportation, doctors, writers, mer-
chants— and these could still be helped before
they too succumb to the fate that threatens
all. There are 1,500 Armenians in good health
— men, women and children, including grand-
mothers sixty years old and many children of
six and seven — who are still at work on a section
of the Bagdad Railway between Eiran and
EntilH, near the big tunnel, breaking stones

23

and shovelling earth. For the moment they
are being looked alter by Herr Morf, Super-
intendent Engineer of the Bagdad Railway ;
but the Turkish Government has registered
their names too. As soon as their work is
finished, as it will be in perhaps two or three
months' time from now, and they are no
longer wanted, " new homes will be assigned
to them," — that is, the men will be taken off
and slaughtered, the pretty women and girls
will find their way into harems, the remainder
will be driven hither and thither without food
through the desert until all is over.

The Armenian nation has a claim to German
help. When Armenian massacres threatened to
break out in Cilicia several years ago, a German
warship appeared off Mersina. The Commander
called on the Armenian Katholikos at Adana
and assured him that, so long as Germany had
any influence in Turkey, massacres like those
under Abd-ul-Hamid would be impossible. The
same assurance was given by the German
Ambassador, von Wangenheim, to the Armenian
Patriarch and to the President of the Armenian
National Council in an interview last April. '"•■'

Even apart from our common duty as Chris-
tians, we Germans are under a special obligation
to stop the complete extermination of the half-
million Armenian Christians who still survive.
We are Turkey's allies and, after the elimination
of the French, EngHsh and Russians, we are the

* 1915-

24

only foreigners who have any say in Turkish
affairs. We may indignantly refute the lies of
our enemies abroad, who say that the massacres
have been organised by German Consuls. We
shall not be able to dissipate the Turkish nation's
conviction that the Armenian massacres were
ordered by Germany, unless energetic steps are
at last taken by German diplomatists and officers.
And even if we cleared ourselves of everything
but the one reproach that our timidity and weak-
ness in dealing with our ally had prevented us
from saving half a milHon women and children
from slaughter or death by starvation, the
image of the German War would be disfigured
for all time in the mirror of history by a hideous
feature.

It is utterly erroneous to think that the
Turkish Government will refrain of its own accord
even from the destruction of the women and
children, unless the strongest pressure is exer-
cised by the German Government. Only just
before I left Aleppo last May,* the crowds of
exiles encamped at Ras-el-Ain on the Bagdad
Railway, estimated at 20,000 women and child-
ren, were slaughtered to the last one.

* 1916.

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